Pictures from the LHC incident

A few days ago, CERN released pictures from the LHC incident. Here’s one from the DG’s talk. There are a few more, plus a video of the repairs, in their press release. This interconnect between two magnets is normally straight.

If you add up the energy stored in the magnets during the 5 TeV test, it comes to about 6 MJ, of which 4 MJ was dumped into a system designed to absorb energy on a rapid demagnetization. Unfortunately, 2 MJ is the amount of energy a 3-ton SUV has when it crashes at 90 miles per hour. Twenty-nine magnets need actual repairs, which is not too bad of a load for a factory that built over 1,600 in the past 7 years. A lot of the talks about this focus on new preventative measures to identify spots of high resistance (several more have been found, though they were all within specifications, unlike the one that caused the accident) and to absorb more energy in the case of future accidents.

The new start-date for powering tests is the end of June, 2009, with beam again in July (a 10-month delay).

From a personal perspective, though, it turns out that the beam collected last September was exactly enough for the tests I needed to do. (Whew! for me, at least.)